Prehensile Feet

Hi, I'm Diane [inaudible] Marino and I'm going to give you a tutorial tutorial on an exercise that's in the classic [inaudible] repertoire on the reformer and it's called prehensile and I've sort of been driven crazy, trying to get my students to really feel and see which I'm going to teach you right now what the prehensile feels like and looks like kids are right. So without further ado, I'm going to sit down on the reformer. All right. No, no. Swing around here. Carefully lay yourself down. Now I'm going to lift my legs straight up in a 90 degree, right?

My toes are pointed, my knees are straight. I'm going to flex my feet. I'm trying to get the soles of my feet onto the ceiling. That's a full flex right now, not changing the angle of my ankle. I'm going to curl or grip my toes. See, let's try that again.

You're going to flex your feet and curl that action, that curling action, making a fist with your feet. That's what Pew pre hand silos. You try to get your heels close to the underside of your toes. With that position. If I bend my feet, Ooh, what's going to happen? I'm going to put the underneath side of the ball of my foot on the bar.

That's the curling action of prehensile. What I see mostly is this just a half hearted attempt? It's an [inaudible]. I'm dirty bar. Now, if I keep that pressure under the bar, I'm trying to let my heels beat the bar in the race. I keep them low as I come in and you would take a normal rhythm, but I'm constantly pressing on it. Here's me releasing. All right.

What I also see is the wrong placement of where you are on the board. I can't really grip if I'm in, in the joints of my toes. See that I can't. I can't. I can't and just can curl under. If I edge him up. Now I can grip. Alright, pressing under and Dan, let's do that one again.

Ball point. Lift. [inaudible] curl thinking. You know there's a foot exercise hepatitis give you when you're standing to pick up a pencil. That's how much curve a grip you need. All right. Flex and curl. Breath, curl. Hold in. The men, the men, the men, the net. And now you might have adjust here.

Alright, let me show you what that is. All right. Here's my toes. Yeah, there's the ball of the foot. Alright? The heart then needs a little flesh. You one here. Wait about there. Right about there. There's that curl. Oh, I almost think of it like a bird foot. So the toes and the healer coming around so you can balance on that tree branch.

And again, prehensile and, and, and easy peasy. So you're working both of those arches in your feet pressing under and n. Now you're cramping, right? You need this. We gotta work those feet. There's a lot of muscles in there. Don't ask me how many, I don't know. Alright, now I'm going to come up.

I'm going to show you an analogy, uh, with my, uh, we, that was a teaser, okay, now pretend the hand is your foot. Your toes. All right? If I make a fist and you're looking at your hand, now see how those knuckles are prominent. They come up. That's what you want to see on your feet. It's hard to do it laying down. I'm going to give you the next exercise. We can get a visual of it all right and relaxed. Now what I see, and some people have sort of a hammertoe.

They're just spending like from the second toe. If you just been from the second joint, you see those knuckles? They're not coming out cause you're not curling to make that fist. Alright? It's strong. And just doing that. You see how much that that takes? Even your hand, it takes him. All right? So just that don't, and that's the Hammertoe. All right, and let's do it. So we give you a visual.

Now I have my trusty little sticky pad. I'm going to place it, uh, not too far forward. We're going to go into sort of a mock stomach massage position. I'm going to do one leg at a time and sweep around just yourself. Now you can see is see, see your toes. I'm gonna put that foot rest, that leg a little bit. Yeah.

Press it right underneath the hard part of the ball, the foot curling, curling, getting that heel under the bar and the toes over. Alright? You can grip and you can hold yourself here with your hands. All right? Or the leg in the air and work the hip flexor. Now look at that foot. Look at that foot. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. See, my knuckles are coming out and I don't have good feet, but I'd have really lousy feet if I didn't work on. The thing right now is I went into this hammertoe thing here.

All right? That's what I see a lot of. All right? There's no knuckle there. Alright, and you're not working the tendon. You Watch. I'm going to adjust to the position. Well, let's look at that 10 in there. That's strong. You need that right now. You sell again and let's try that other way.

Cool out and see that tenant. Push it. Push it real hard. Push really good under under why? Let's try it with both ways. That works. I never thought of that before. Heal under. Whoa.

You feel that in your calf too? Sure. If you're up here, a Nada, nothing. Ah, yeah. If you have enough flexibility, give them a little push. Push work. A little street where costly, low up to go. Oh, hang porous and in and stretch. Hang a bow. Good feet, good feet, come and open. Treat your feet well, work, work them, work 'em grab them and work them the other way to give me some love. Giving some love, putting in your lotion, whatever you do, and you beautiful people work each little joint, send the energy into it.

And even if you have your foot and you're looking at it, you can see you have that transverse arch and you launch it to, to large. You work both of your arts and you'll, you'll, you'll start cramping less. And that is a small modicum of what I have to say about the prehensile. Now you must learn prehensile before I can teach you, hence Hensel. Thank you.